By Morning Star
From 2008, PCD started to explore its working attitudes and approaches in light of the concepts and techniques of nature education. From this, different attempts have been made to carry out “Affective Nature Education”. The word “Affective” here refers to “passion” and “motivation”, and suggests kindling the passion inside ourselves, and a caring attitude to all issues around us. It also suggests cultivating one’s motivations in taking action, and the balance between charity and wisdom. For the last three to four years, we have held different types of experiential courses and training courses, in Guangxi, Beijing and Guizhou. Many participants learned from these experiential camps notions of the relationships between humans and nature, between individual humans, and connection to the individual’s self.
Besides these, this April our Hong Kong head office held a <山情水意 shanqingshuiyi> - an Affective Nature Education experiential retreat. It was designed for our staff to take a break after a series of hardworking trips, to give them a chance to release their inner strength, and try to gain new inspiration from nature. In the retreat, we discussed our organisation’s understanding of nature education, and the working attitude of starting from the heart, and planned our future agenda. We invited the founder of the Hong Kong Gaia School, Qing Shui(清水), to design the retreat, as well as sharing her experience and learning from practising Affective Nature Education over the last ten years.
Though it was three relaxing and simple days, we had fruitful results. We came to recognise that starting from the heart was concerned with strengthening our inner self, then connecting it with mercy. In the future we will further explore aspects of starting from the heart, and internalise them in our culture of cooperation and work.
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